All successful websites depend on returning visitors. It’s key to keeping relationships alive between you and your prospects, clients and any other onlooker.

We all know that it is easier to sell to someone that has bought before… that is why returning visitors are easier to convert (that is if you have an goal set for each visitor to be able to measure your conversions - more on this later).

The more often people return to a site, the more trust they have in that site… then they keep coming back and post links to you from all over the place.

Here are some simple things you can do to keep people coming back to your site, time and time again:

1) Start a blog, forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with other visitors and your organisation. As the conversations build, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously to be part of a community that they are contributing to.

2) Start a web log (blog)

Keep an online journal, publish articles and issue news stories on your blog.

People are curious in their very nature and they will keep their eyes glued to your blog if you post fresh items frequently. You will also build up your credibility, proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website, and also trust in the fact that you know what you are talking about.

3) Publish polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. They can also be used for you to do some market research of your visitors, providing you with valuable information to improve your products and services.

Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results are. Give deadlines to the polls and surveys, also provide a date that the results will be available.

4) Ever thought of a branded game for your site?

You and I both know that many office workers procrastinate at work every day - Facebook, Deadwhale.com, Twitter etc etc. You will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. Think about keeping it relevant to your products and services, but also bang on brand too. Hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize and even arrange to meet to present the prize. Take a photo, add as a news story yo your blog.

5) Most importantly - update frequently with fresh content

Updating your site frequently with fresh content provides your visitors upon their return, something to new read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh nuggets!

Filed under  //   Church website design   Web design   Website Design   Websites  

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I was asked recently if I could provide some insight into Church website development and as part of some of the recent projects I have been involved with, what I have learned and how best to outwork a project such as this.

There are some specifics here to Church website development but on the whole there is no reason why much of this process could not be utilised for any web design project.

If I were to take on another project such as a Church website design or Church web project of any kind, I would get all the facts and a defined brief before starting anything! No designs, no quotes for work... just a really well design brief first.

In church life you have so many people that are involved in so many areas of the church and would all like to put their two pennies worth into something like a website. How can you deal with the wants and desires of everyone at the same time?

You don’t.

The best advice that I could give you is work with, at the start, the leaders to find out:

• What they want from the website?
• Why they think they need a website?
• What do they want to do on the site?
• What are the key areas/pages of the site for them?
• Who do they see using it - visiting the site or involved in updating?

After working with them on this, start to look at some level of content structure - I always find that flowcharts work best. This will help you understand what content is going to be produced and where it will sit in a site structure - in other words a paper version of a sitemap.

This will help you to shape the design, user interface and the navigation.

At this point still only work with the leaders. Get them to sign off the design and structure before doing anything else...  then comes the fun bit... 

...look at getting all people who lead ministries of the church to a meeting or send them a questionnaire - the purpose... to get from them what they would like in their section of the site.

The lack of response may tell you that people are not that bothered and if the leaders were going to give people responsibility to others to update the part of the site relevant to their ministry it may be an uphill struggle to get them to do this.

On the other hand a good response may show you that there are people who want to help and assist you with the updating of the site and could have some ideas that the leaders and you may not have thought of.

All in all, for a church it is a huge project that should be done at the right pace, not rushing into it, planning it well and executing it better. As a church, we should be willing to invest time and energies into getting something polished to the highest standard - standing out from the crowd.

It does pain me sometimes to see church sites that have had very little effort put in and have not been updated for ages. In my opinion as Christians, we need to be relevant without deviating from the Word of God - the web is constantly evolving and some churches are just not moving with the time in terms of web and other communication.

Lets have less of the peach papered photocopied time new roman or comic sans leaflets and a more professional edge to our communications.

Filed under  //   Christian   Church website design   Web design   website design   Websites  

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How many people when starting up in business knew that they needed a website? Almost all of you I guess.

What are these guys know for? FREE business cards. Cheap and tacky. What does that say about your business? There are a few people out there that will allow you to have a FREE website without advertising their own business, but they are few and far between. Invest a little more time in looking for hosting that is relatively cheap if you have a tight budget, some even come with website builders built in.

2  - Hook people in and capture their data.

Think about how you can offer visitors to your site something of value (value to them), so that you can ask for their email address. Think about something you could offer over a few days. A florist for example could do a 7 day introduction to flower arranging. This could be made up of 7 emails, one per day, each linking to a 10 minute video his/her site. This way they are opting in to receive emails from you for 7 days and beyond, unless they can subscribe - and quickly you will generate leads to which you can freely market other products.

3 - Update your site regularly

If you are going to put good quality, compelling content on your website... keep it up to date. If people see that things are out of date or have not changed from one month to the next, why will they come back? Keep your site up to date yourself using a Content Management System or a Blog Feed, or have a contract with a web developer to update content for you. This makes both your users and the search engines see that you site has value.

Filed under  //   Marketing   Websites  

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